Dick Scott

PARIHAKA PUFFERY (Ask that mountain)

The
closing down of the illegal Parihaka commune only attained present-day
visibility because of a 1954 book by Pakeha Communist, Dick Scott, “The
Parihaka Story,” and its 1975 update, “Ask That Mountain.“

Scott
was the first writer to widely publicise the story of the destruction
of Parihaka village in Taranaki by colonial forces in 1881. It has
proven to be a very influential story. Wrote former Listener journalist
(and fellow Communist), Denis Welch “Not many books change the way
people think but, like its near-contemporaries Silent Spring and Bury My
Heart at Wounded Knee, Scott’s did: his dramatic tale of the passive
resistance shown by Te Whiti and his followers, and their shameful
treatment by the colonial authorities, was eventually to play a key part
in radicalising young Maori and raising Pakeha consciousness about the
racism inherent in this country’s development.”

Who is Dick
Scott and why, in the early 1950s did he choose to write a book about an
obscure piece of NZ’s colonial history? From a Manawatu farming
background, Scott mixed with the Communist Party of New Zealand (CPNZ)
during WWII in Wellington and went on to formally join the Party in
Palmerston North. Scott’s first exposure to the CPNZ’s Maori programme
was Party member Ron Meek’s 48 page pamphlet “Maori Problems Today.“
Meek’s work had argued that both the Maori and the Pakeha working
classes shared the same struggles and was written to assist in “forging a
bond of unity between Maori and progressive Pakeha.“ Meek wanted the
CPNZ to take up Maori problems, in order to secure “an intelligent and
powerful ally … to make the inevitable change to a real New Order to
come faster and less painfully.”

Scott went into journalism and
in the late 1940s was one of several undercover Communists working on
the Labour Party’s daily newspaper, “Southern Cross“. These included
Scott’s friend and comrade, cadet reporter, Noel Hilliard. Already
working on the manuscript that became “Maori Girl,” Hilliard asked Scott
to review his work. Scott used his secret party status to advantage. He
infiltrated the “right wing” anti- Communist group “Catholic Action“,
had clandestine dealings with the US embassy and gained union positions,
all by keeping his Party membership secret.

In 1946 as a 22
year old, he even accepted a Manawatu Labour Party nomination for the
General Election. The CPNZ made Scott withdraw his name as they feared
the embarrassment should his true loyalties be discovered. Later in
Auckland, Scott held night time meetings with young unionist, Eddie
Isbey, in the Parnell Rose Gardens. Formerly a Communist in London,
Scott advised Isbey to stay out of the CPNZ. Isbey joined Labour instead
and later became a Minister Outside Cabinet.

Scott did become
an open Communist for a while however and edited the Party’s newspaper
“People’s Voice” for a brief period. Scott says he left the CPNZ in the
early ’50s, but his earlier secrecy and admitted dishonesty must cast
some doubt on that claim.

About this time, aged 29 and bedridden
with measles, Scott began reading from a 640 page legal tome “Bryce v.
Rusden“, the story of a defamation case, associated with the 19th
Century military incident at the Taranaki Maori settlement of Parihaka.
The case had been heard in the High Court in London. Rusden lost. Former
Native Minister, John Bryce, was awarded £5,000 in damages, a vast sum
in those days. According to one of his close acquaintances, Rusden was
“a violent Tory in everything except where natives were concerned' and
'even more violent as an advocate.” Not to put too fine a construction
on it, a known pro-Maori partisan [aka “Wigger”] like the Reverend
Octavius Hadfield, from whom Rusden had got much of his hearsay
information about the events he claimed to be chronicling. This was the
man whose discredited polemic, “Aureretanga: The Groans of the Maoris,”
Dick Scott became so taken with.

Scott had co-incidentally
picked this book from the library of Wellington businessman Siegfried
Eichelbaum. When Mr Eichelbaum died, his daughters had invited him to
pick a book from his library. Of the four girls, at least two, Anne,
later married to economist Wolgang Rosenberg and Cath, later married to
unionist Pat Kelly, were CPNZ members. Scott was inspired to look into
the Parihaka story and travelled to Taranaki to undertake research.

On
the 5th of November 1881 Native Minister John Bryce had sent 1600 Armed
Constabulary and volunteers to close down the illegal Parihaka commune
after numerous provocations by its inhabitants. During this exercise,
not a single person lost their life, and the only casualty on either
side was a boy whose foot was stepped on by a trooper’s horse. Yet Scott
managed to puff it up into what he later promoted as one of NZ’s most
shameful episodes.

Scott worked on “The Parihaka Story” through
1954. He was able to afford to devote time to the project because CPNZ
member and dentist, John Colquhoun, kindly employed Scott’s wife Elsie
as a temporary dental assistant. The book was printed by sympathetic
former “conscientious objector” Owen Smith and came out in time for
Christmas 1954. “The Parihaka Story” polarised left and right. Wolfgang
Rosenberg gave it a very favourable review in the union journal, “The
Building Worker“, leftist Bob Goodman praised it in the “Auckland Star“
As Scott has said “Two of my favourable reviews were written by
[Communist] refugees from Nazi Germany. They were from two friends. Any
good review I got, looking back, were from people I knew.”

The
“Listener” was subtly critical of Scott’s evident partiality. It said
“Mr Scott is a passionate advocate for the Maori -- his history, product
of much research, would be even more impressive had he written it with
less bitterness and violence.”

The Taranaki Daily News was more
scathing. It ran several articles attacking the book’s accuracy and
alleged bias. “… It is surely no coincidence that a leading member of
the Communist Party has recently published The Parihaka Story reviving
GW Rusden’s long-disproven allegation of wrongs done to the Maori,”
wrote Alexander Boyd Witten-Hannah on 29 January 1955. Two weeks later,
Witten-Hannah wrote of being visited by a Mr Pokai, who: “… came to my
home and told me of his feelings in words that give a complete answer to
the malicious innuendos in a recently published book by a Communist
journalist, obviously designed to revive the memory of old wrongs for
political advantage.”

Scott says his early political leanings
were well known. “I have to be honest, I had been a member of the
Communist Party when I was young, but I wasn’t then.” In December 1955,
Scott learned that “Foreign Languages Publishing House” in the Soviet
Union was proposing to include “The Parihaka Story” in their 1956
history section. Scott later received a cheque for the then substantial
sum of 300 Guineas from his Soviet publisher.

In the 1970s,
Scott reworked the book and had it re-published as “Ask That Mountain.”
It has gone into eight printings and around 25,000 copies. As PM Helen
Clark said in 2004. “Most famously, The Parihaka Story in 1954, as
developed into the fuller account Ask That Mountain in 1975, has had, in
the words of Denis Welch, ‘as profound an influence on our national
sense of history as any book ever written.’ Having visited Parihaka, I
can only affirm what Dick Scott found when he brought that story into
New Zealand’s general consciousness – that it is a special place with a
special history which must never be forgotten.”

Special history,
indeed! Special pleading, more like – a marathon piece of special
pleading carefully crafted by a white Communist to foster racial
discord.